About Successful Nonprofits Podcast Host Dolph GoldenburgDolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.

Today’s episode explores a unique path that one nonprofit took to transition from steady, incremental growth to a dramatic program expansion and impact. : buying a for profit company.

We spoke with David Shaffer, CEO of First Step Staffing. In 2015, First Step Staffing was a $2 million nonprofit organization providing employment opportunities for low-income, hard to employ people (including those who are homeless and citizens returning from incarceration). The nonprofit took a bold step by purchasing a for profit staffing firm with annual revenues of about $20 million!

One year after the purchase, First Step staffing was using the combined infrastructure to have a much larger impact on the community. They provided employment to over 2,100 of Atlanta’s homeless, and 86% of those working over 180 days were able to rent their own residence!

This unique conversation explored:

Identifying the company to purchase

Being willing to walk away from the wrong deal

Due diligence necessary to purchase a for profit company

Financing the purchase of a for profit company

Merging two entities with very different organizational cultures

Identifying metrics to track

Understanding the purchase’s impact on charitable contributions (they went up, listen to find out why)

Dolph is recognized as a high performance leader in the nonprofit sector who served as a nonprofit CEO for a dozen years and a fundraiser for an additional ten years. Author of the book Successful Nonprofits Build Supercharged Boards, Goldenburg also founded a boutique consulting firm based in Atlanta.His multi-state consulting practice provides interim executive transition, strategic planning, and organizational development services. The Goldenburg Group's clients have annual operating budgets ranging from $25,000 to over $25 million deployed in the areas of housing, education, civil rights, arts and culture, workforce development, health services, and community-based services.

This week on the Successful Nonprofits Podcast, we speak with author and fundraising consultant Ellen Bristol.

Bristol’s effective fundraising counsel is the result of 4 decades of experienceanddata from over 1,000 nonprofits that completed the Leaky Bucket Assessment. This innovative online assessment measures nine key practices that contribute to or detract from your fundraising efforts, which are summarized in her book "The Leaky Bucket: What's wrong with your fundraising and how you can fix it".
Those taking the survey included very small organizations to those with multi-million dollar budgets. Shockingly, the median organizational score on the Leaky Bucket Assessment was a C-minus.

To find out how organizations be more effective at fundraising, our conversation focused on three important factors for fundraising:

Appropriate staffing

Involving volunteers in development

Laws for fundraising performance

Hiring and supporting dedicated fundraising staff is one of the key indicators for fundraising success. Bristol notes that organizations with no dedicated fundraising staff only meet their fundraising objectives 39% of the time. For this reason, we discussed:

Why your next staff member should probably be a fundraising professional

How to hire the right person to lead your fundraising efforts (Bristol’s answer is counter-intuitive and 100% accurate)

Why promoting from within is not the best way to fill your first development position

In addition to using paid staff, the organizations that are most successful at fundraising also utilize volunteers. In our conversation, Bristol recommended providing volunteers:

Thorough training for volunteers

Scripts, collateral, and other resources to explain why the organization is worth funding

Significant staff support for volunteer fundraisers

Clear job descriptions for volunteers, board, and staff

Appropriate roles for volunteers

Opportunities to be involved in thanking donors

We finished the conversation with a summary of the four laws of performance management, and you’ll have to listen to the podcast to get these golden gems!

Big data. Small data. Sometimes no data. For something so important, we often don’t know enough about how to collect and analyze our organization’s most important outcome measures. For this reason, I sat down with data guru Khurram Hassan who provides strategic planning, evaluation, and program design consulting to nonprofits, foundations, and governments.During this conversation we discussed: